In new book, Francona, Epstein fire strikes

The murkiness that still clouds what happened to the Red Sox in September 2011 may be about to clear.Terry Francona’s new book is due out Jan. 22. “Francona: The Red Sox Years.”

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By
TIM BRITTON
Posted Jan. 15, 2013 @ 6:48 pm

BOSTON — The murkiness that still clouds what happened to the Red Sox in September 2011 may be about to clear.

Terry Francona’s new book is due out Jan. 22. “Francona: The Red Sox Years,” written with the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy, will cover Francona’s eight-year tenure in Boston — one that ended acrimoniously following the team’s 7-20 finish to the 2011 season.

The book is excerpted in this week’s Sports Illustrated. In passages released Tuesday, both Francona and former general manager Theo Epstein appear critical of Boston’s ownership group, comprised of John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino.

Francona questions the commitment of the owners to the sport.

“I don’t think they love baseball. I think they like baseball,” Francona says in the book. “It’s still more of a toy or hobby for them. It’s not their blood. They’re going to come in and out of baseball. It’s different for me. Baseball is my life.”

Such a criticism is rather tame, all things considered, and it’s nothing particularly new. Fenway Sports Group has been rebuked in the media for its ownership of the English soccer club Liverpool for the last three years.

Francona, of course, left the Red Sox unceremoniously after that 2011 season, and his rift with ownership carried over to 2012. Francona said last February that Henry wasn’t returning his calls, and the manager was conflicted about returning to Fenway Park for the 100th anniversary celebration in April.

He explained those emotions at the winter meetings last month.

“It was kind of weird,” said Francona of his departure from Boston. “I didn’t have a chance to like sit back and think about not having that job. Two days later, I was defending myself. So it was hurtful. And where it went from there was disappointing. Time does have a way of … I don’t want to go through life being, I don’t know if vindictive is the right word, but that’s not healthy. I had too many people there that are too special. I was disappointed in the way it ended, and I’ll probably always feel that way, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great seven years and five months.”

Epstein is quoted in the excerpt as saying that ownership told the front office that the team needed “some sexy guys” following a third-place finish in 2010. Epstein obliged by signing Carl Crawford and trading for Adrian Gonzalez. Obviously neither move worked out, with both now playing for the Dodgers.

“We’d become too big,” Epstein says in the excerpt. “It was the farthest thing removed from what we set out to be.”

The criticism that Crawford and Gonzalez were acquired mainly for marketing reasons is not new. It’s one the owners have denied, with Henry going so far as to say last offseason that he opposed signing Crawford.

“Can you imagine spending $300 million for PR?” Henry said incredulously during an October 2011 radio appearance on WBZ-FM. “[Crawford was] definitely a baseball signing. In fact, anyone involved in the process, anybody involved in upper management with the Red Sox will tell you that I personally opposed that. They all know that.”

Earlier this year, Epstein — now president of the Cubs — talked about the difficulty maintaining a patient approach to team-building in a big market. He referred multiple times to “the monster” of expectations in Boston, and how it occasionally led the Red Sox down the wrong path.

“As a leader of baseball operations, it’s my responsibility to manage that [monster] and to be true to our own philosophies and to put the best team on the field and build the best organization so we can succeed year in and year out,” Epstein said in an interview with WEEI.com and the Boston Herald. “Our successes were probably well-documented, so any failings have to be attributed directly to us in baseball operations.”